From the Editor: Welcome to The Princess Anne Independent News

PUNGO – Fair enough – this is about the worst time to start a newspaper since Johannes Gutenberg went and printed himself up a Bible or two.

So just try to forget the fact that you’re looking at paper when you read us in print. That doesn’t matter so much as the words, images, and information it carries to you.

Every bit of this is local. That’s the part worth caring about.

The Princess Anne Independent News is a local small business that gathers up news and gives it to you. We’ll cover community news for people in the southern part of Virginia Beach here at the site and in print. Our print publication schedule is every other week, starting with the edition that came out on Friday.

We’ll take a couple weeks off around the holidays, and we’ll come back ready to work in 2016.

The goal is to give readers a mix of news and community features from the perspective of our coverage area. It roughly aligns with Virginia Beach’s Princess Anne voting district. We’ll be in places as unique as Landstown and Sandbridge, Salem and Back Bay, Courthouse and Creeds.

It’s a mix of suburban, beach, and rural communities that speaks to the diversity of industries, institutions, and people that define this city. From time to time, we’ll cover Knotts Island, N.C., too.

We hope advertisers will see the newspaper and — eventually — the website as a means of supporting original journalism and storytelling while also reaching the people most likely to seek out their services and goods. My goal as editor and publisher is keep The Independent News free. We need ads to keep doing this.

I hope you’ll pick up this and forthcoming editions of The Independent News at dozens of local businesses and institutions. A full list of locations is here. We’ll update the list when we gain new locations.

Please call, email, and post here or our Facebook page to tell us what you think. Your advice will shape this into the news source our communities deserve.

We welcome letter, essays, photographs, reflections, and editorials. We will not make political endorsments in our forum, but we will publish the views of our citizens and, from time to time, our own.